An outsider´s miscellany of thoughts

“An outsider´s miscellany of thoughts having been on the inside for a long time“

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”( O.W.)

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of."-- Edward L. Bernays

History is thick with converse Jews. Loyola, Cervantes, Columbus, Torquemada, and the star of them all, Josephus Bar Matteus, aka Flavius. Adopted Messianic Jewish General after being taken war prisoner and flipped roman with Vespasian/ Titus as his saviours and mentors, given an apartment in the emperor' palace, organized the Imperial Cult, the roman fake news religious meme factory, the only place to be for a live wire, thought control on an industrial scale throughout the empire, not for mystical moral purposes but to homogenize from Scotland to West Africa..(P.T.)

William Blake famously wrote:

 "Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour."

 A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." - Walter
 You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic." - Robert A. Heinlein.

"The things that will destroy us are:

politics without principle;

pleasure without conscience;

wealth without work;

knowledge without character;

business without morality;

science without humanity;

and worship without sacrifice."

-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi

Ah yes, truth. Funny how everyone is always asking for it but when they get it they don't believe it because it is not the truth they want to hear." - Helena Cassadine 

"Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth." -Mark Crispin Miller

"What's wrong with our children? Adults telling children to be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children  not to  be violent while marketing and glorifying violence... I believe that adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America." - Marian Wright Edleman 

"The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear": Herbert Sebastian Agar 
The dissenter is every human being at those times of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself. Archibald Macleish -  (1892-1982)

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things through for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable." - H. L. Mencken

"People in the West need to understand that if the news they receive bears on the interests of the US military/security complex, the news is scripted by the CIA. The CIA serves its interests, not the interests of the American people or the interests of peace." - Paul Craig Roberts

 "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair  

"Convince a man against his will, He's of the same opinion still." - Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) - British writer and feminist,

"Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do." - Bertrand Russell 

Be the creator of your future, not a product of your past.

Learn, unlearn and relearn. 

One is valued by what one can do, not by what one has done.(P.T.)

 They say man is made in god's image. Typical immature reversal. Is the image in the mirror?

God is really made in man's image.(P.T.)

To all the school kids who went on 'strike' for climate change.

You are the first generation who have required air-conditioning in every classroom. You want TV in every room and your classes are all computerised. You spend all day and night on electronic devices. More than ever, you don't walk or ride bikes to school but arrive in caravans of private cars that choke suburban roads and worsen rush hour traffic.

You are the biggest consumers of manufactured goods ever and replace perfectly good expensive luxury items to stay trendy. Your scooters and skateboards are increasingly... electric!

Furthermore, the people driving your protests are the same people who insist on artificially inflating the population growth through immigration which increases the need for energy, manufacturing and transport.

The more people we have, the more forest and bushland we clear and more of the environment is destroyed.

How about this: tell your teachers to switch off the air-con. Walk or ride to school. Switch off your devices and read a book. Make a sandwich instead of buying manufactured goods.

No, none of this will happen because you are uneducated, selfish, virtue-signalling little turds inspired by the adults around you who crave a feeling of having a "noble cause" while they indulge themselves in Western luxury and unprecedented quality of life.

The invisible hand of the economy has seen fit to make televisions and video game consoles cheaper instead of education, health care and food. One of the great attractions to patriotism, it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of a nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat while feeling we're profoundly virtuous." : Aldous Huxley. Architect of MK Ultra.

"A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors." : W. R. Inge

Schooling is teaching people not to dare think for themselves.  Just obey and shut up. (P.T.)

Original sin through the three Abrahamic religions and life after death are the two pillars of power. Slave, wife, child, turn the other cheek and pay Rome! Before, during and after.

 No two countries in Europe have a common narrative (P.T.)

Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act."Albert Einstein

The banksters run the world, the rest of us just live here.

Breaking up words into components and their cultural adaptations has been my life-long hobby.

Public officials receiving bribes in return for sacrificing the interests of their own country while bribing officials of other countries to then sacrifice the interests of their own countries is their business. There is no other.

'The world is a business, Mr Beale.'

It seems the only thing public about public office is the public money they consider private.

Mammon rules the cattle farm by three instruments.

Schooling/ Media/Religion.

Goldman Sachs.

War.

We find ourselves at any point in history on a tread wheel of mind controlled slavery painted green and made of plastic.

Wishing is typical of kids and girls.

Time to start recognizing the cruel  plantation slavery of total mind control.

 Watch this Space A privatized war soon coming to a theatre near you.

No conventions apply, certainly not the Geneva convention. No rules. A question:

Are we in an uncontrollable, exponentially increasing, population growth?

Or, are we in a deflating spiral of dire population decline?

 Just saw a  ridiculous text titled, if God is dead is everything permitted? First God is man made, second glorifying universal power is not a moral thing. Evil people can celebrate the universal order that provides lambs for predators on an ongoing basis. Morality and religion are separate subjects. Ignorant believers are far more evil than coherent atheists. Ideologically programmed pawns with multiple doses of nonsense force-fed since birth do not have the neuronal pathways open (except on weed maybe) to evaluate the psychic weather, much less the psychic climate. What they do have is a compulsive need to impose themselves.

We end up living according to dead people. (P.T.)

There is soft and hard censorship. Soft is called self censorship. Then there is the until now never demonstrated freedom of expression, of speech.The off side rules are always hard to explain. Freedom of speech means you are free to say anything you like as long as you are careful to choose who you say it to. That part is never written into the temporary privileges that we mistakenly call rights. (P.T.)   
 Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? 

Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms…And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”

Philip Dick wrote Blade Runner

"Everyone is lying all the time."  Remember that, because the CIA lives and plays and operates from that assumption.  It is how we survive and endure.  We manipulate lies.  We exchange one lie for another.  We feed people new lies that create a lock with their old lies. We build foundations for lies.  We decorate lies.  We lie to attain truth.  And what is that truth?  The secret shape of the planned future: a universal stimulus-response empire.(Rapoport)

War is coming. We live in exciting times. middle east theatre. time to start thinking preparation. 

especialy the things which cost little but will become very valuable.

All wars are bankster wars. The rest is procedure.

Before Pearl Harbour the Japanese were economically strangled, 

sanctioned,  fuel starvation to provoke a war with them.

same old game plan versus Iran plus their team.

It is on the point of getting hot. even if we are not front line the real result will be 

total kontrol plus humilliation, deprivation, psychological torture. 

Truth is the first casualty....

Peter Trainin.

Mad about psychology and psychiatry/ Going mental at Psy..

I´ve felt let down by most school psychologists. They have lacked serious knowledge and expertise about their subject matter. I remember having donated hundreds of copies of Journals of Child Psychology and Psychiatry only to find they were to be thrown into the wpb....

"Severe mental illness has troubled the history of Psychiatry. Researchers  have explored the brain’s anatomy in an attempt to identify the origins of mental disorders. The studies ultimately proved fruitless, and their failure produced a split in the field. Some psychiatrists sought nonbiological causes, including psychoanalytic ones, for mental disorders. Others doubled down on the biological approach and “increasingly pursued a hodgepodge of theories and projects, many of which, in hindsight, look both ill-considered and incautious.” The split is still evident today.
The history of mental disease is a series of pendulum swings. in the last two centuries touted breakthroughs disappoint, discredited dogmas give rise to counter-dogmas, treatments are influenced by the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry, and real harm is done to patients and their loved ones."

Snipped, copied and tweaked from  Mental illness by Jerome Groopman, The New Yorker  May 2019.

 As a child I was the victim of a psychiatrist Dr. Guija in Seville  in the early 1960´s who administered drugs which were to have serious effects on my mind for the rest of my life:(Synergina & Huberplex).
He was just one in a series of psychiatrists I had to visit on a regular pilgrimage for no obvious reason at all..

Overdiagnosis: the most common disorders I´ve found in my students are a series of acronyms:

(Find out more about each item)

ADHD/ ADD

 O.C.D. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder  

G.A.D. Generalized Anxiety Disorder

 S.A.D. Seasonal Affective Disorder

SUBSTANCE ABUSE

Child abused

 Impulse Control Disorders (Kleptomaniac/Pyromaniac/etc..) 

P.T.S.D. 

Eating disorders (Anorexia & Bulimia)

 Mood Disorders 

Psychotic disorders  

Bipolar  affective disorder (B.A.D.)

Borderline/Limit personality disorder

Major Depression 

Schizoid Personality

Paranoid Personality  

Psychopath 

Sociopath

Specific phobias (name at least ten common phobias)

Remember no one is immune and there is great difficulty in establishing who is 99% sane.

Name two more common syndromes present in our daily interaction.

The A-Z of being early retired

The A-Z of being early retired /(retarded)

I have to keep on reminding myself that I´m retired so am living in the oxymoron of active retirement. Because of inertia or our deeply-ingrained habits and mental frames I still lead both an intellectually and physically energetic life.  The A-Z compendium that follows could be valid for: Students, teachers, parents, singles, divorced, doctors, nurses and so on…:

ANXIETY BUSTING

BOREDOM BLESSINGS  (Sp.donkey´s I´m lying)

CONFIDENCE CONVERSATIONS   COMPETITIVENESS?

DANGER DEATH DREAMING ON

EXPLORING EMPATHY & EMOTIONAL VERTIGO & ENTHUSIASM

FOUND FREEDOM, FINDING YOURSELF, FORGIVE & FORGET,  FLATULENT FAMILIARITY

GOING GREEN, GRATITUDE, GROWING OLD (DIS)GRACEFULLY

HOLIDAYING (permanent)

INTERNET INSIGHTS & INTUITION

JUDGEMENTAL? JUVENILIA JABBERWOCKY..

KUDOS (credit, honour and prestige) & KNOWLEDGE

LOSSES,LAUGHTER AT LEISURE,LOVE SONGS & LUST, LIVING A LIE…

MATURING, MEDITATION AND MINDFULNESS  Mistakes

NEW ACTIVITIES or even NOTHING       NO

ON YOUR OWN

PERSONAL POWER, PATIENT PERSEVERANCE,PASSION, PRIDE AND PLEASURE

QUALMS (Those annoying little guilt pangs you get in a fit of loneliness)

RELAXING and RETHINKING YOUR APPROACH TO LIFE

SURVIVING SHOPPING, SHARING SPIRIT

TEMPERING YOUR TEMPER

USED TO ( remember when you used to smile?...)

VOICES IN YOUR HEAD  ( not to be confused with tinnitus)

WISDOM? WALKS…

XXX´S= kisses

YOU

ZERO (the chances of surviving after 100)

Special thanks to Jeff Green´s The A-Z of being single and Nora Hall´s Survive your Husband´s retirement

(S)TRAIN & DRAIN your BRAIN once again

( This unit has been inspired by the New UXBRIDGE ENGLISH DICTIONARY, which bears some resemblance to the famous Jose Luis Coll´s Dictionary or more recently to Luis Piedrahita´ s El castellano es un idioma loable, lo hable quien lo hable )

We are pushing the boundaries of the English language. Pick any word and offer an alternative, punning definition for it based on the syllables within.Not to be confused with UNWORDS, which you make up such as Infoxication, intaxication,etc..

I´ll just give you some examples so that you can make up your own funny definitions. You´ll realize it´s not too hard:

ADULTERY: What happens after puberty 

ALTERNATIVE: To modify a member of the indigenous population 

 BARBECUE : A Long line of plastic dolls

BOYCOTT : A small bed for a small child 

CELTIC : a prison for fleas 

CASTANET: Go fishing

DIALYSIS: Ring your sister 

DISCOVER: Jamaican for duvet 

EUTHANASIA Young people in China 

FRANCOPHILE : Spanish dictator´s medical records 

GAUCHO: Argentinean Marx Brother 

HYPOTENUSE: The lavatory´s engaged; High pot in use;..

 IVY : Roman for Four 

JACUZZI: Italian version of famous essay by Emile Zola 

KNEEPADS: Scottish turnip commercials 

LAMENTABLE:  The Sunday roast is ready 

MIASMA: the reason I have an inhaler 

MISSISSIPPI : wife of Mister Ippi 

NUBILE: recent speech by Vox leaders 

OPTIMIST : the view through a cataract 

 PASTA: An Italian priest 

QUESTION: Quests I´m ON and off

 RUBICON : Imitation gemstone 

SCANDALS: Sandals with socks 

SENILE: What to do in Egypt  see CHIROPRACTICE

TOUCAN: a couple of tins 

UGANDA: Go and have a look 

VIGILANT: A insect that stays up all night

 WALNUT An obsessive bricklayer 

 XYLOPHONE : Fake storage

YO: A yoyo that only goes one way 

ZUCCHINI: an animal-park enthusiast.

Try doing the same with the following words: Instagram,  Chiropractice, Cloak, Allocate, Hamstring, Woman, Wallaby, Tomahawk, Placebo, Grapple, Leotard, Benign,etc.. ( Not to be confused with blends or portmanteauwords such as Fantabulous, Humongous, Shambolic, etc..)



Deconstructing Spanish & English: a Spanglish code:

Ex: Independiente = En shop-assistant / En of ear-ring/ En of pluma tooth /etc..
20 =Thou in Thee/ You within you/ etc..
To become= come 2 be/ come 2b/..
Indifferent=
Aceisfate=?
Begoteas= ?( a famous Spanish writer) 

I will be cream=? ( some music)

Cachonfinger....

The importance of being insignificant (a zero on left)

The importance of being extremely insignificant -a zero on left -or Notes from an intellectual armchair adventurer (inspired by the thoughts of Peter Trainin, Neko Vidal and others)

(I´m) just rambling on as usual and putting my thoughts on cyberspace (formerly paper) by listening to myself and others:

On retirement I was told that I (someone who had teaching in his DNA) would be a zero on left –

We are taught to harbor false expectations from our birth…till our death; from the cradle …...to the grave.  I´m a spiritual atheist…

Any good book is a thinking man's best friend. Beware of the person who only reads ONE book.

Turns of phrase to retire to: Competences, incompetence, evaluation, assessment, marks, tests, multiple-choice, exams, projects, all the latest buzz words and more.

… In uniform these types (like some principal whose name I´d rather forget for good) would be vocationally adapted, but they are not military, they are corporate, plain clothes ordinary specimens and in utter submission to authority and the law.  Not physically dangerous, these people are bureaucratically lethal. I am sure we all recognize the type. Not funny people at all, at all. They are sad, mad and bad. They lack empathy and become dangerous sociopaths. Eventually they´ll ascend the rat-race ladder, helped by the chatterbox HMI or their kith and kin. I never took their authority seriously since adolescence. In fact I harbor a visceral distrust, disdain and repulsion for unfounded authoritarian sheepdogs and those who live in thrall to them and their cider house rules. If anyone feels safer protected by cannibals fine, but do not assume universal moral superiority. Those who live by imposed arbitrary authority will die by it in a dark corner. Their minds live in a separate world from reality (Like the emperor´s new clothes´ story).

Game over for good. Came to a bad end like everything else in life…Brexit wrecks it.

.

More bilingual palindromes: OXEN are NEXO, OXEN ERA NEXO; LAMINA ANIMAL; NURIA A I RUN; OI RATON NOTARIO; ANITA ATINA;…

SPAIN´s open wounds: Unmarked mass graves; the long shadow of dictatorship still fresh; cultural and historical fantasies, selective memories, collective amnesia,…

 Utopia and Realities “Just a few centuries ago, when a few people first raised their voices in protest at the human indignity of one person being able to buy others in the marketplace and treat them as if they were just another commodity, not only were they called utopian, gullible and naïve, but they were reminded with a certain (faulty) logic that what had been the custom for thousands of years, since the beginning of mankind, would never change.  Today, the very idea of buying a human being not only strikes us as loathsome but also seems absurd.

Exactly a century ago, in the time of our grandparents, when a debate surfaced in European parliaments about the possibility of extending the right to vote to women, history repeated itself; those who proposed the change were branded utopian, naïve and removed from reality for proposing the granting of rights to that half of humanity, which had been unjustly excluded from decision making on social issues.  The conservatives of the time, while insulting and mocking progressive men and women, maintained that such a thing would never become a reality.  Today we think it so natural that women have the vote that not even those on the extreme right dare question it.

Despite affecting all human societies on the planet, these two social changes, possibly two of the most important in the history of humanity, did not come about as a result of a bloody world war, but primarily through dialogue.

We often forget that our current representative but non-participatory, democratic system has two centuries, born in the American and French revolutions, and our educational system, emerged in Prussia two half centuries, both are obsolete because they were created for companies, with most of the illiterate population and half of it, women, without any social right”.

Surrealism is a very old trick. Accuse your accusers of what they accuse you.

Fake news calling the inconvenient truth, like the gospel (allegedly good news - euangelos-when in fact it´s –pseudoangelos-, fake news).

Unending surrealism. Another invention by fellow humans to deceive us, fellow humans. "Stop thinking of yourself as an ordinary human being who has ordinary problems that need to be solved."

Our mental tattooing has installed disneyfied nostalgia for a past that never existed.

In the year 1800 there were 8 times fewer people than now. And that was only 219 years ago!

But ingrained reverence for mediocre authority figures, well versed in tangling logical fallacies into their self-serving justification for perennial hegemony, has been the engine of modern history, which equals propaganda.

It is beyond some specific case of country or person. It is plain common sense which has been anesthetized by ignorance, fear and greed for several centuries and worldwide. Awesome!!!

Here are those that read something and accept it without research and those that read it and reject it without research.

The first act out of spite for the authorities while the second act out of reverence for authority and to spite the conspiracy theorists.

Truth here is not relevant.

And then there are the spineless sycophants who never had an opinion on anything that was not dictated by their personal economic or psychological dependence on conformity.

The certainty mindset —wanting to have ‘the’ truth — can stop you from growing as a person. Rather than discovering life, you get stuck in what it is familiar.

The world is fluid and unexpected—life is always a surprise. You don’t need certainty; but to be open to challenging your truths. That’s the path for personal discovery — to seeing life sharply.

Certainty can cripple your life

“There is no certainty; there is only adventure.” — Roberto Assagioli

Being certain doesn’t mean that you have the right answer.

The mind is incredibly averse to uncertainty and ambiguity. When we don’t know something, we create our own reasonable explanation. According to cognitive science, we prefer to hold on to these invented justifications than to admit we don’t know what happened.

Having an answer is not correlated to seeing life sharply.

Social psychologist Arie Kruglanski coined the term ‘cognitive closure’, to describe our aversion toward ambiguity and uncertainty. We prefer having an answer as quickly as possible rather than to discover the truth.

During times of fear and anxiety the need for cognitive closure increases.

Studies have demonstrated that, after terrorist attacks, society feels an urge to find who’s responsible. Fear feeds rumors and fake versions — people share stories without any validation. The desire to punish someone gets everyone out of control — it becomes okay to accuse the first apparent suspect.

Being under attack rapidly affects our logic. Anyone is guilty until proven innocent — not the other way around, as it should be. That’s how the desire for certainty can cripple our lives.

The need for closure makes you see the world in black and white — you simply close your mind to new information.

Skepticism is not being in denial

“Do you want to know what my secret is? I don’t mind what happens.” — Jiddhu Krishnamurti

Trying to find an answer is not wrong — being blinded by the need for quick resolution is the problem.

When we overreact, things get out of hands. The medicine becomes more dangerous than the disease we are trying to cure.

The opposite of the need for closure is skepticism. Rather than taking the first answer for real, you challenge the truth. You don’t let irrational fear dictate your answers.

Skepticism is not nihilism or being negative; it’s adding an extra filter. Rather than taking anything for granted, you want to validate the truth. You don’t take social constructs as true no matter how strong peer pressure is.

The need for certainty can shape your perception — your own stories cloud reality. You don’t do it on purpose, of course. We all fall victims to the  mind tricks. Challenging your own beliefs requires training your critical mind.

Developing a critical mind will prevent you from taking the social constructs — rumors or not — for valid.

That’s how rumors get started in the office. One person creates the story and shares it with two different people. Then they wait and see. When someone listens to a similar story coming from two different ‘sources,’ the rumor is validated.

Being skeptical doesn’t mean being rigid, dogmatic, hypercritical, or obtuse. You simply understand that you cannot react to the first given answer, you want more evidence before buying into it.

Skepticism is not denial either. Anything is possible (or not) until proven the contrary. Challenging a theory is how new lines of thinking are created. If you believe that one idea is an absolute truth, you don’t leave room for incremental improvement.

You can be a skeptic without being a cynic.

Cynicism is distrusting most information you see or hear, especially when our beliefs are being challenged. Cynics are tricky — they have a strong argument to debunk other people’s ideas, but have little support to justify their beliefs.

Cynics are intolerant — they have inflexible thoughts that leave no room for additional ideas.

Skepticism is not thinking that beliefs are wrong, but that they may be wrong, as I wrote here.

There are two types of skepticism: negative and positive. By removing bad ideas, negative skepticism allows good ones to flourish.

Positive skepticism goes beyond the removal of false claims. The Greek word ‘skeptikos’ means “thoughtful.” While the need for closure is a reaction in the heat of the moment, being skeptical is less impulsive. It requires inquiring and reflecting.

Positive skepticism fuels critical thinking— it encourages you to get a deeper understanding of events or things.

Instead of taking the truth for granted, you question it first.

The truth will set you free “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.” — Jim Davis

Our need for certainty might overshadow facts.

People who are certain of an opinion are more likely to act on it. The elections are a great example. When people are confidently in favor of candidate X, they are more likely to vote for that candidate than someone who is uncertain even though they support the same candidate.

The surer someone believes he/ she is right; the harder it is to persuade that person that he/she might be wrong. When people feel sure, it’s harder to change their minds.

Certainty can get you stuck in a position; you shut down to new alternatives.

You have the freedom to choose. But the truth is not optional, right?

Neurologist Robert Burton argues that certainty is not a conscious choice, nor a thought process, but a sensation — it’s the ‘feeling of knowing.’ Like anger or fear, it doesn’t rely on a deep state of knowledge. The author explains how most times we are wrong even when we’re convinced we are right.

Ulric Neisser, the father of cognitive psychology, conducted the “Challenger study” to question what he called ‘flashbulb memories’ — how shocking, emotional event leave a vivid imprint on the mind. Students were asked how they’d heard about the disaster, where they were, what they were doing at the time, etc. Neisser collected information the day following the incident. He repeated the experiment three years after. Students expressed high levels of confidence that their false memories of the explosion were more accurate than the descriptions they had written down one day after the explosion.

One student commented, “That’s my handwriting, but that’s not what happened.”

The autonomous rational mind is a myth. The answer, Burton argues, lies in accepting the limits of our ability to know and in “playing by the rules of scientific method.”

The concepts of the self and free will are innate useful fictions that allow us to function. As Samuel Johnson said, “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it.”

Modern neurophysiology tells us our decisions are made subconsciously before we are aware of deciding.

The way of the skeptical mind

“In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.” — René Descartes

Embrace positive skepticism

Turn challenging the “truth” into a habit. Once again, I’m not asking you to become a cynic and distrust everyone. Positive skepticism is about finding the other side of the story.

 To understand whether the sources and analysis are impartial.

Listen to both sides of a story. Look for heterogeneous sources. Set your conclusions aside before read all the information. Ask: What if? In order to explore different hypothesis.

Avoid reacting as mobs do

Most crowds belong to an identifiable group — the collective beliefs dictate the crowd’s action. Fear and anxiety erase logic and rationality. All the mob cares is to find a scapegoat.

Beliefs blind individuals. When the mob is blind, the behaviors are even more damaging. Try to calm the mob before things go out of hand.

Be open to change your mind

It’s okay to believe something and then, after reviewing the facts, realize that either you were wrong or your memory was playing tricks. As it happened to the participants of the “Challenger study.”

Changing your mind is wise. People who get stuck to what they believe is true, stop learning.

Turn challenging truths into a healthy habit

Continually question the truth, especially yours. There is never a 100% guarantee that we are right. Burton suggests we use the words “I believe” instead of “I know.”

Admitting that ‘your truth’ is actually a belief will set you free. It becomes easier to challenge your interpretation of real events.

Adopt a ‘maybe mindset’

The world is uncertain and continually mutating. What was right yesterday, will not be okay tomorrow. Scientists are constantly discovering new theories that debunk previous ones.

The same happens with life events — what seems positive today might unexpectedly turn into negative tomorrow. Truth is ‘provisional’ ,  adopt a ‘maybe mindset,’ as I explained here.

We don’t control life events.

Life is about discovery, not about being certain. Being skeptical will prevent you from taking things for granted — you will see life sharply.Increase Your Self Awareness

 Stretch Your Mind. Knowledge does not bring wisdom, It brings a higher quality of ignorance.

The wilfull ignorance of the lumpen  is evident in their arrogance.

The unwilling ignorance of the bright  is evident in their humility.

Being offended  to defend the politically correct is psychic cancer.

To comprehend is not to learn.

To understand is not to have insight.

To inculcate is dog training. Ideological bromide.

To share skills is deeply satisfying. Like being a true teacher. Synergetic love.

These are loaded words. P T.

O.K. English rules the world O.K....

(Copied from a recent magazine)

From a global perspective, it is not America that is threatened by foreign languages. It is the world that is threatened by English

Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.

One straightforward way to trace the growing influence of English is in the way its vocabulary has infiltrated so many other languages. For a millennium or more, English was a great importer of words, absorbing vocabulary from Latin, Greek, French, Hindi, Nahuatl and many others. During the 20th century, though, as the US became the dominant superpower and the world grew more connected, English became a net exporter of words. In 2001, Manfred Görlach, a German scholar who studies the dizzying number of regional variants of English – he is the author of the collections Englishes, More Englishes, Still More Englishes, and Even More Englishes – published the Dictionary of European Anglicisms, which gathers together English terms found in 16 European languages. A few of the most prevalent include “last-minute”, “fitness”, “group sex”, and a number of terms related to seagoing and train travel.

In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own – to little avail, for the most part. (As the journalist Lauren Collins has wryly noted: “Does anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academy’s diktat, are going to trade out ‘sexting’ for texto pornographique?”) Thanks to the internet, the spread of English has almost certainly sped up.

The gravitational pull that English now exerts on other languages can also be seen in the world of fiction. The writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are increasingly being written in a kind of denatured, international vernacular, shorn of country-specific references and difficult-to-translate wordplay or grammar. Novels in this mode – whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German – have not only assimilated the style of English, but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily digestible in an anglophone context.

Yet the influence of English now goes beyond simple lexical borrowing or literary influence. Researchers at the IULM University in Milan have noticed that, in the past 50 years, Italian syntax has shifted towards patterns that mimic English models, for instance in the use of possessives instead of reflexives to indicate body parts and the frequency with which adjectives are placed before nouns. German is also increasingly adopting English grammatical forms, while in Swedish its influence has been changing the rules governing word formation and phonology.

Within the anglophone world, that English should be the key to all the world’s knowledge and all the world’s places is rarely questioned. The hegemony of English is so natural as to be invisible. Protesting it feels like yelling at the moon. Outside the anglophone world, living with English is like drifting into the proximity of a supermassive black hole, whose gravity warps everything in its reach. Every day English spreads, the world becomes a little more homogenous and a little more bland.

Until recently, the story of English was broadly similar to that of other global languages: it spread through a combination of conquest, trade and colonisation. (Some languages, such as Arabic and Sanskrit, also caught on through their status as sacred tongues.) But then, at some point between the end of the second world war and the start of the new millenium, English made a jump in primacy that no amount of talk about it as a “lingua franca” or “global language” truly captures. It transformed from a dominant language to what the Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan calls a “hypercentral” one.

De Swaan divides languages into four categories. Lowest on the pyramid are the “peripheral languages”, which make up 98% of all languages, but are spoken by less than 10% of mankind. These are largely oral, and rarely have any kind of official status. Next are the “central languages”, though a more apt term might be “national languages”. These are written, are taught in schools, and each has a territory to call its own: Lithuania for Lithuanian, North and South Korea for Korean, Paraguay for Guarani, and so on.

Following these are the 12 “supercentral languages”: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili – each of which (except for Swahili) boast 100 million speakers or more. These are languages you can travel with. They connect people across nations. They are commonly spoken as second languages, often (but not exclusively) as a result of their parent nation’s colonial past.

Then, finally, we come to the top of the pyramid, to the languages that connect the supercentral ones. There is only one: English, which De Swaan calls “the hypercentral language that holds the entire world language system together”. The Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura similarly describes English as a “universal language”

My pet hates

MY PET HATES………..(me) (Structural ambiguity)

They say Christmas is a period charged with an overdose of religious feelings when the good and happy pretend to be better even becoming angelic and the sad and neurotic get  more depressed and even suicidal.(They also add that a perfectly adjusted human being would be silent about their hates)

I´ve vented out my pet hates, people, objects and situations I just can´t stand like the so-called Christmas spirit:

Celebrity magazines ( Cuore, Love, Vanitatis, Pronto, Lecturas, Semana, Hello, 10 minutes, etc.) – they are all superficial, banal toilet paper publications!

Preachers, charlatans and manipulators ( What they think is their reality)

People glued to their mobile phones whose only realities come through the net.

 I really hate the English love of animals over human beings (Thanks to David Goodland)

I hate the noise level in bars, discos and restaurants

I loathe above all Nationalism, put above Unity between Countries. I will always be a European citizen of the world, whatever happens next year.

I loathe and detest BREXIT (as I  hate intolerance and politicians who pick on minorities and use 'immigrants' as a euphemism for 'hating foreigners'.)

When you can remember things from years ago but you can´t remember what you ate yesterday/ what you went into the kitchen for.

Being in a hurry for no obvious reason

Poisonous beliefs: Anything from bioneuroemotions, religions or magnetic energy to NLP

( In fact, people can believe whatever they like but when you stop and look closely at the sort of strange ideas people believe you realize that the world is populated by insane locos on a hitherto undreamed-of-scale)

When they tell you it is HISTORY and it is Propaganda/ Fake news since humankind began.

 The use of baby talk in indirect speech.

People who show off their material possessions.

When my shoes pinch/ do not fit or my clothes oppress me.

The use of the illogical first person singular or plural when relating an impersonal event in the past, or when phrasing interrogative words like how, why, when.(Thanks to Pete Trainin)

Gullible airheads at the kitchen table who believe in every sort of alternative remedy.

Boring politicians and nobody seems to perceive their verbal incompetence and immaturity.

The chronically infantilized politicians who demonstrate their lack of intellectual agility by clinging to clichés, ready-made sentences and over(re)acting.

Next, replying to questions with the word So, which is deductive not causal. Same neuro linguistic degradation as above.

Those who ape and flatter authority constantly by assuming a pandering posture of slave to authority expecting some rewards in return.

Priests, architects, doctors and lawyers find themselves implicitly dealing with the uninformed (chronically ignorant). Their profession implies loyalty to the feudalism that keeps them inside the castle walls.

Being bossed about by the know-all arrogance of the ignorant.

When people talk too much about themselves and never listen to others.

Opportunistic people who have forgotten it was chance and luck which put them there and not their own merits or values

People who believe in miracles like the virginity of Mary but are indifferent  to genuine scientific wonders.

People who exert coercive persuasion, abuse of power and the pedagogy of fear.
Ersatz psychologists and psychiatrists who adhere to pseudo-therapies to rob you of your money.